the groundhog day project

With action movies, it's easy. With courtroom dramas. Even with romances. If--and if they had, this movie would have probably been quite forgettable--they had gone ahead and filmed the scenes with Stephanie DeCastro , maybe it would have been easier. But, what makes Phil's situation so hard is there is not clear victory to be had, no simple solution. Chasing after Rita is not dictated by some Fairy Godmother or Magic Mirror. Phil's situation is both entirely his own doing and entirely not. It's simple. It's complex. It's unsolvable. And, eventually, it solves itself. Like life. If you're lucky. If the social and cultural and political and ethnic and racial rolls go in your favor and circumstance doesn't set you as an example for everybody else. The thing is, however silly bullshit American Dream lines feel all too often-- you can accomplish anything if you just put your mind to it , you can be anything you want to be and all the similar lies we tell...

Another possibility is that Phil suffers a psychological breakdown in the middle of the film. I mean, the repeating day has got to be stressful. Your brain would have to come up with entirely new ways to process some information. And, film Phil, without the book calendar, has no way of tracking his passage of time. So, maybe Daughton and Bacha have a point in saying Phil is idealizing Rita. Perhaps, he's losing his mind and all those date days, even more identical than previous days were, finally break him, and those slaps just do him in. I mean, consider this: When Phil steps in front of the truck to commit suicide, he opens and closes his hands, an odd move, but seemingly meaningless. However, that motion mirrors Rita in front of the bluescreen back at PBH in Pittsburgh. Maybe he's depressed and suicidal not because he can't have Rita but because he can't be Rita. And, even as he's killing himself, he's still trying. So then, in this context, Phil's spe...